If the Trump administration wants to deregulate trucking, it will find no lack of suggestions where to start.

Comments on a Department of Transportation (DOT) request for information on rules that could or should be modified or replaced drew 896 comments in one month from industry organizations, state transportation officials, businesses and individuals.

The comment period closed this week, and the list of regulations the respondents want amended or eliminated is long. Many of those responding were independent truckers.

In particular, they targeted proposed mandates that would require speed limiting devices on truck engines and automatic emergency brakes (AEB) in heavy trucks, truck driver hours of service (HOS) rules, the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate and more.

Those proposals and rules have been controversial since their inception. The current HOS rules and the ELD mandate were issued during the first Trump administration.

It may be easier for regulators to drop or postpone pending regulations, such as a proposed requirement that trucks be equipped with speed limiters, than to rewrite existing rules such as the ELD mandate and HOS regulations. Many of the requests regarding those rules echo debates with prior administrations.

Proposals that would mandate speed limiters were issued in 2016 under the Obama administration and then under the Biden White House in 2022. That last proposal remains active but has not advanced to a final rulemaking.

The ELD mandate, implemented in late 2017, reshaped trucking, making it much more difficult to evade HOS limits. Many comments from truck drivers simply suggested some variant of ending the use of electronic logs and going back to paper logs.

The request for information and the flood of responses are part of the Trump administration's effort to identify and cut rules it considers unconstitutional, unlawful, unauthorized and unnecessarily burdensome.

But respondents also called for new regulation that would help deter cargo crime and fraud.

The National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC) called for a permanent freight fraud enforcement task force with the DOT Office of the Inspector General.

“This task force should be solely tasked with enforcing laws against fraud in transportation by investigating incidents and developing cases to bring to the Department of Justice,”the NASTC said in its comments.

The organization also wants the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to“diligently maintain”its National Consumer Complaint Database to fight fraud cases.